That didn't feel better. The nice, shiny new Gigabyte K8NS-Ultra 939 has now officially gone Tango Uniform. I'm going to be on the old Athlon 700 (my DOS gaming box) until the new board and video card arrive from Newegg. I'm getting away from the Nforce chipsets again, and going back to VIA, which has tended to treat me better. And since I have to bite the bullet, might as well get a PCI-E board and a tiny Geforce to tide me over... One of these days I'm actually going to be able to =use= Infinite....

Hi, Could you please tell me more about what's going wrong with your K8NS motherboard. I intend buying a new computer with a MSI K8N-NEO FSR motherboard having also a Nforce chipset. Maybe I may reconsider it. Thanks in advance.

Well, let's see: The SB Audigy card would be recognized by Windows, but the driver installer packages kept reporting that there was no card to detect. And both that card's sound quality on played files like waves was horribly distorted. The AC-97 onboard sound was just as bad, and an Audigy 2 turned in equally bad sound. So there is definitely something wrong in the PCI bridge. There were major OS install troubles I tracked down to using SIIG PATA to SATA bridges, in an attempt to reuse older IDE drives. The actual motherboard started to 'lose' a SATA drive on bootup; a hard reset usually cleared that, but not always. This was on the SIL SATA RAID add on chip's channels. Finally, the boot drive on the main chipset started going 'away'. At the moment, I'm betting it's either a cold solder joint, one of the board layers didn't bond correctly and has separated just enough to be fatal, or I just lucked out and got a bad chipset.

OK thanks for these clarifications ... seems to me that you got indeed a defective motherboard. Regards.